Chapter 1: The functioning of meta-metafiction1.1 Frame and frame-breakThe obvious self-referentiality at the beginning of Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, which I parodied all 'beginning At the beginning of this article, immediately indicate that it is a metafictional text. Even a reader unfamiliar with the literary devices of irony and parody would be able to appreciate the self-reflexive humor of a book that "forces us to regard it as an artifact" (McCaffery 183) rather than a transparent medium. through which we read the narrative. However, such blatant self-referentiality risks coming across as a smug technical literary exercise that some might call “frivolous” (Dipple 9). Rather, most metafictional and meta-metafictional texts function as commentaries on their status as particular fictional texts through the use of parody and irony, presenting a spectrum from the most overt to the most subtle forms of self-referentiality. Many critics have already discussed how metafictional texts use parody and irony to expose literary conventions and “disrupt the codes” (Narcissistic Narrative 39) that structure the reader's experience and interpretation of fiction. While there are differing opinions as to how exactly this “deconstruction of illusion” is achieved (Waugh 14), most commentators recognize the use of parody and irony in the interplay of framing devices that “establish a hierarchy of contexts and meanings” (Waugh 36 ) within the text. As James Pearse points out, conventional frames of reference such as “the narrator's voice (first person, third person, etc.) and the narrator's vision (limited, omniscient, reliable, etc.)” (Pearse 73) are destabilized in metafiction , challenging the concept of a final authoritative voice that… in the center of the paper… the character occupies the second largest frame and has the most authoritative voice within the narrative. At first it seems that this character is Kinbote as he drives the narrative of Pale Fire despite seeming completely unsuited to writing a work of criticism. His commentary on the poem “Pale Fire” takes the form of his fantasies, often resulting in a personal voice that is entirely unsuitable for criticism due to its lack of relevance to the poem. In the preface, his exclamation of annoyance that "[t]here is a very noisy amusement park right in front of [his] current lodgings" (Nabokov 11) is a parody of the convention of the neutral and objective critic who avoids irrelevant personal information. curiosity in his analysis. In this way, his commentary breaks the framework of his critical project as an implicit commentary on the nature of the text and moves into the metafictional mode of writing..